Novel feature of the 1974 Olds Toronado / TUE 1-20-26 / Skill shared by bats and dolphins / Hellenistic storytelling / Sports grp. for Coco Gauff / Fight night souvenir, perhaps / Historic destination for Pueblo pilgrimages / Modern pickup sport for delivery drivers / East coast convenience chain with a reduplicative name / Tour overseer, for short / Mayberry boy of '60s TV

Constructor: Jonathan Raksin

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (just a bit harder than the typical Tuesday)

[23D: "Star Wars" princess (LEIA)]

THEME: ECHOLOCATION (53A: Skill shared by bats and dolphins ... or, when read as two words, what 19-, 26-, 34- and 44-Across each is) — locations of four different "Echo"s:

Theme answers:

• NATO ALPHABET (19A: It begins with Alfa and ends with Zulu) (Echo = letter "E")
• GREEK MYTHOLOGY (26A: Hellenistic storytelling) (Echo = Nymph in love with Narcissus)
• AMAZON WAREHOUSE (34A: Modern pickup sport for delivery drivers) (Echo = some stupid A.I. thing you allow to surveil you in your own home for some reason)
• THE GRAND CANYON 44A: Historic destination for Pueblo pilgrimages) (Echo = sound repetition)

Word of the Day: Echo (of GREEK MYTHOLOGY) (26A) —

[Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse (1903)]

In Greek mythology, Echo (/ˈɛkoʊ/; Greek: Ἠχώ, Ēkhō, "echo", from ἦχος (ēchos), "sound"^[4]) was an Oread who resided on Mount Cithaeron. Zeus loved consorting with beautiful nymphs and often visited them on Earth. Eventually, Zeus's wife, Hera, became suspicious, and came from Mount Olympus in an attempt to catch Zeus with the nymphs. Echo, by trying to protect Zeus (as he had ordered her to do), endured Hera's wrath, and Hera made her only able to speak the last words spoken to her. When Echo met Narcissus and fell in love with him, she was unable to tell him how she felt and was forced to watch him as he fell in love with himself. [...] [According to Ovid's Metamorphoses], when Narcissus died, wasting away before his own reflection, consumed by a love that could not be, Echo mourned over his body. When Narcissus, looking one last time into the pool uttered, "Oh marvellous boy, I loved you in vain, farewell", Echo too chorused, "Farewell." // Eventually, Echo, too, began to waste away. Her beauty faded, her skin shrivelled, and her bones turned to stone. Today, all that remains of Echo is the sound of her voice.(wikipedia)

• • •

There's something regrettable about the fact that this theme has to go through Amazon. I guess that since the Amazon Echo exists, you gotta use it, but ... do you? I just find it so depressing to see the puzzle shilling for Amazon, a behemoth that does not need the free advertising. And I can't think of many places on earth more depressing than an AMAZON WAREHOUSE, nor any grid-spanning answer I'd less like to see splashed across the center of my puzzle. After I finished the puzzle and grasped the "Echo" theme, it actually took me a few beats to understand how AMAZON WAREHOUSE worked. I thought, "yeah, they are pretty vast, your voice probably would echo in there... but... that's the same kind of echo that you'd experience at THE GRAND CANYON. You can't repeat echoes like that ... [two seconds later] ... oh. Right. It's a 'smart' device. <sarcasm> Great </sarcasm>." I think this would make a very nice three-themer puzzle. It's ridiculous that you've got the the Echo in a warehouse anyway. Most people only ever see the Echo in their homes (if they see them at all). AMAZON WAREHOUSE does have the "virtue" of making clear the Echo in question (it's got AMAZON in it, after all). Honestly, from a purely structural standpoint, the answer works fine. It's just that my personal distaste for all things Bezos and the anti-free trade, anti-union behemoth that is Amazon prevents me from really liking this puzzle as much as I'd like to. It's amazing (and heartening) to me that BEZOS, despite having a five-letter name with a very attractive "Z" in it, has appeared in the grid only once, and not for 15 years now! Let's keep that trend going!

The theme concept is a winner. Nice wordplay on the revealer. Really delivers on the aha. The fill on this one I liked less. Easier to fill a puzzle cleanly with fewer themers—just sayin'! The cramming together of three themers in just five rows makes the crossing fill veer sharply toward SLOP (40D: Unappetizing food). The puzzle is definitely at its crosswordesiest through there, from AGRA through LEIA ORG WTA WAWA HAR LAH to the ETNA SLOP and the always regrettable UEYS. Just not a pleasant place to spend time. But alarm bells were going off much earlier, actually. I was just POSIES PGA ORD-deep in the puzzle when I paused and thought "ORD? Already? Uh oh." It's an airport code, it's a Fort in California, it's short for "ordinance" (or "ordinal"), it's [checks database] a river in Australia!? OK, take it easy, 1989 Thursday puzzle. Anyway, ORD is some top-shelf crosswordese. OOXTEPLERNON (the god of bad short fill) always flies through O'Hare, both because it is a hellish place where people often get stuck (apt!), and because it has the crosswordesiest airport code of them all. What about SFO and LAX, you say? At least those have the cities they serve embedded in the codes themselves. ORD is some nonsense you just have to memorize (O'Hare's original name was Orchard Field Airport). I don't mean to pick on ORD too much, but every time I see it, I wonder what's making the constructor so desperate. It felt like an omen, seeing it right away. 

But the most regrettable fill today wasn't the short common stuff. No. Instead, it came when someone LIT A FIRE IN A RUT. That takes the EAT A SANDWICH answer type to a whole new level—the EAT A SANDWICH IN A DINER level. This is the first time this level has ever been achieved, to my knowledge. It's one thing to roll out a weak "[verb] A [noun]" phrase, but quite another to follow that phrase with a "[preposition] A [noun]" phrase. Truly horrifying remarkable. What happens when you light a fire in a rut under a WHALE POD? You don't want to know. Also, WHALE POD felt redundant. A group of orcas is just a pod. Or it's an orca pod. If you know they are orcas, you are going to call them an ORCA POD. I think the clue is bugging me here more than the answer, actually. Check out this ORCA POD in Wellington Harbour:

Speaking of Wellington, or New Zealand, anyway: Split ENZ! (27D: Split ___ (New Wave band whose name sounds like a hair problem)). Seeing ENZ was a moment of deep ambivalence for me, as I love the band but hate to see just ENZ all on its own. Full-name bands > partial-name bands. And the clue was disappointing as well, since there was every opportunity to mention the band's country of origin (the "NZ" is embedded right in the name!), but they chose instead to go for "hair problem" as their hint. Boo. But yay for Split ENZ. They mean a lot to me. So funny to have loved Split ENZ as a kid, and then Crowded House after them, and then to discover (and love) the Dunedin (NZ) bands the Bats and the Chills as a young man, and then eventually, ten or so years later, marry a woman from Dunedin. It's a pretty small city, on the other side of the world! What are the odds!?

Bullets:

• 43A: Fight night souvenir, perhaps (WELT) — "Fight night" makes me think of the audience's experience, not the fighter's. I wanted something like "ticket stub." Also, this answer was hard because I spelled the (hateful) crossing, UEYS, like so: UIES. Sadly (very sadly), both are acceptable, per NYTXW tradition. 
• 37D: Sports grp. for Coco Gauff (WTA) — once again, I cannot come up with the tennis org. abbr. ATA? UTA? All sports org. abbrevs. are slowly turning into one ball of gelatinous goo in my head. 
• 11D: Novel feature of the 1974 Olds Toronado (AIR BAG) — one of the clues that made this puzzle harder than the usual Tuesday. I was looking for something "novel" in the sense of strange or eye-catching. Like tailfins or a dome or laser beams or something, I dunno. Needed many crosses to see the plain-old AIR BAG.

[1974 Olds Toronado]

• 20D: Prefix for element #8 (OXY) — LOL that I know the Periodic Table that well. I still don't know what element this is. Is it "Contin"? Hang on ... wait, what? Oxygen? So the "prefix for" is actually a "prefix already in"!?!?! If you say "Prefix for" something, I assume (logically) that it is a prefix that you can attach to whatever thing you're talking about, not one that's already part of the word. Unless there is an "oxyoxygen" I know nothing about, I hate this clue.
• 12D: Visibly disdainful (SNEERY) — I am visibly disdainful of SNEERY. I know you can't see me, but trust me: visibly.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. shout-out to my mom, out on the streets protesting fascism (that's her with the "Democracy Depends on Rule of Law" sign) (shout-out to the other lady too!)

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Biblical spy for Moses / MON 1-19-26 / South American flatbread / Pete who directed "Up," "Inside Out" and "Soul" / 1987 song by Billy Joel and Ray Charles / Caribbean island with a liqueur named for it / Lesser-played part of a 45 / 1972 song by Elton John / Midsection measurement

Constructor: Peter Gorman

Relative difficulty: Medium (solved Downs-only)

THEME: LITTLE ROCK (66A: Capital ofArkansas ... or a description of 17-, 29- and 50-Across?) — "rock" songs with synonyms for "little" in the titles:

Theme answers:

• "TINY DANCER" (17A: 1972 song by Elton John)
• "SMALL TOWN" (29A: 1985 song by John Cougar Mellencamp)
• "BABY GRAND" (50A: 1987 song by Billy Joel and Ray Charles)

Word of the Day: Pete DOCTER (52D: Pete who directed "Up," "Inside Out" and "Soul") —

Peter Hans Docter (born October 9, 1968) is an American filmmaker, director and animator, who has served as chief creative officer (CCO) of Pixar since 2018.^[2][3] He has directed the company's animated films Monsters, Inc. (2001), Up (2009), Inside Out (2015), and Soul (2020). From his nine Academy Award nominations, he is a record three-time recipient of Best Animated Feature for Up, Inside Out and Soul. Docter has also won six Annie Awards from nine nominations, a BAFTA Children's Film Award and a Hochi Film Award. He describes himself as a "geeky kid from Minnesota who likes to draw cartoons". (wikipedia)

• • •

 

Hmm ... I guess this works. These are "rock" songs, and their titles contain words meaning "little," but somehow LITTLE ROCK doesn't really seem to express that phenomenon very well. Rock songs about little things = LITTLE ROCK? OK, if I think about the answers themselves actually being little (as opposed to just containing words meaning "little"), it makes a little (!) more sense, and therefore I like it a little better. The songs were all very much in my wheelhouse, all things I heard on the radio repeatedly—"SMALL TOWN" the most, probably, since that was a huge hit in my teen years; "BABY GRAND" much less, because it was much less of a hit; and "TINY DANCER" a lot, but mainly on classic rock stations (it came out when I was roughly 2, but it's one of Elton John's most famous songs, and plays an important role in Almost Famous (2000), a movie I loved). Sadly, knowing all the songs didn't help at all, since I solved Downs-only. Well, it helped with "TINY DANCER," for sure, since that is obviously a song title, but as far as I knew, SMALL TOWN and BABY GRAND were just ordinary phrases, not song titles. This may be why when I finished the puzzle and realized LITTLE ROCK was the revealer, I ... didn't really get it. I saw the "little" but not the "rock." I kept looking at the second words in each themer, expecting them to be some kind of rock, or to follow (or precede) the word "rock" in familiar phrases. I wanted those second words to do something ... rocky. But it's the whole song that's rock-y. Fine. Not exciting, but fine. 

The Scrabble-f***ing here is pretty obvious—high-value Scrabble tiles crammed into various remote crannies of the grid. You know the fill is not going to be optimal when you've got a pangram on your hands. When you strive for a pangram, getting every letter of the alphabet into the grid ends up taking precedence over making the grid as lively and clean as possible. No one cares about pangrams, everyone cares about good fill. The pangram is a stunt that I thought had passed out of favor forever, but apparently not. Anyway, this grid has at least one of every letter of the alphabet. Whoopee. It also has AIS. I'd've done anything I could to get the execrable plural AIS out of my grid, even (especially!) if it involved wrecking the pangram. That said, there's nothing particularly horrible about the fill today, and the long (7+) Downs do have a certain spark. A SPARK PLUG, even. The biggest "huh?" moment of the solve, for me, was DOCTER, a name I have somehow never seen or heard of despite the fact that I know all the movies mentioned in the clue (Up, Inside Out, Soul). Weird that directors of animated films don't tend to have the same name recognition as live-action directors. Aside from Miyazaki, I think Brad Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles) is the only animated film director I can name off the top of my head. Anyway, Pete DOCTER is obviously extremely successful, but wow I did not know his name, which meant that I had to infer every single letter from the crosses. Thankfully, in the end, there was no real ambiguity, but UNSEE definitely took a while to come together. I really wanted that to be ENSUE. 

There were other tricky parts of the Downs-only solve. I had B-SIDE instead of SIDE B for 28D: Lesser-played part of a 45. Super-annoying that either one is technically "correct." You'd think we'd have settled on one or the other by now, but no. In NYTXW history, there have been 32 BSIDEs, 30 SIDEBs. Bizarrely, neither one ever appeared in the puzzle before the Shortz Era, despite the fact that the term "B-SIDE" dates back to the '40s. I assume SIDE B goes at least as far back. I tried to look up "SIDE B" just now, to figure out its origins, but all that came up was a kind of Christianity I have *never* heard of:

Side B Christians are Christians who identify as LGBT or have LGBTQ+ experiences, but take a traditional view of human sexuality and thus commit to celibacy or a mixed-orientation marriage. The term Side B derives from an Internet forum where Side A Christians, with an affirming view of LGBT sexuality, were contrasted with Side B Christians. Prominent Side B Christians include Eve Tushnet, a lesbian Catholic based in Washington, DC, and Bekah Mason, executive director of Revoice. In particular, Side B Christians reject conversion therapy. Side B is also distinct from Side Y, which does not affirm LGBT identification. (wikipedia)

What a weird thing to learn, and what a weird way to learn it. Anyway, that SIDEB section also had AREPA (27D: South American flatbread) and CALEB, both of which I got, but CALEB (26D: Biblical spy for Moses) ... I don't know how I knew CALEB. It's not like I know Exodus all that well [apparently CALEB appears in Numbers, not Exodus; my bad!] . It's an answer that just came to me. I was not at all sure of it, but it *felt* right. So I got lucky there. Other Down answers that gave me issues included a bunch of stuff in the SE: DAZZLES before DISARMS (49D: Wins over with charm), COLD before COOL (62D: Chilly), AREA before ACRE (63D: Surveyor's measure).

Bullets:

• 53A: Midsection measurement (GIRTH) — this is true enough, but why does GIRTH signify heftiness to me? Like, the word seems to have the idea of largeness built in, even though it's just "a measure around a body" (2a, merriam-webster dot com). Would you ever talk about a skinny person's GIRTH? Aw man, I just looked up [skinny person's girth] and all I got was page after page of penis info. I really gotta stop looking things up. It's not going well for me today.
• 61A: Caribbean island with a liqueur named for it (CURAÇAO) — I (now, as of 2026) keep a running list of the cocktail-related clues and answers. I expect I'll be seeing a lot of GIN and RYE, maybe some AGAVE spirits. But CURAÇAO—that's more unusual. A nice surprise. CURAÇAO is probably most famous in its blue form—I think of it as very tiki bar-oriented. The Blue Hawaii—that's got blue CURAÇAO in it. If you want your drink to be blue, blue CURAÇAO is the liqueur you GO TO. In this house, however, we drink Pierre-Ferrand Dry CURAÇAO. It is orange. Because it's an orange liqueur. Makes sense! 

[Bing sang it (in Waikiki Wedding (1937)) twenty-four years before Elvis]

• 35D: Device for starting an engine (SPARK PLUG) — tough for me. I wanted something like a KEY. Something that *I* start the engine with. Something I hold. So I needed many crosses before this answer dawned on me.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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